Lost Cities of Britain: The Quest for Camelot

Published: October 4, 1987

THERE ARE IN BRITAIN VANISHED cities, lost villages, disappeared kingdoms even, some with their names still on the map. Trying to reach them isn't quite as hopeless as trying to reach the rainbow's end, but the point at which their legend and their geography meet is sure to be buried in a thicket of poetry. Digging into both the literature and the earth can produce a few hard facts, although one soon comes to accept that these much pined-for places can exist only in the imagination. Hence the centuries of storytelling, which keeps them alive when they are no more.

Our local vanished city is Dunwich on the Suffolk coast. I have sat on the cliffs there many a time, obediently listening to the bells in drowned churches ringing below the North Sea, for this is what one comes to Dunwich to do. It is precarious to venture to the cliff edge because the soil erosion that tipped this grand medieval city into the waves never stops; but the gentle hourglass trickling of sand and human bones from the last churchyard onto the beach is a sight not to be missed. Such nonplaces, with their resonant names, offer a singular attraction. Some travelers find them haunted or sacred; I find them so eloquent that sometimes I can hardly believe what I hear them saying to me. The experience is far from new. Think of the eloquence of that bumpy mound called Troy.

My favorite long journey in Britain is from East Anglia to Cornwall. I have made it regularly throughout the years since I was 19. It is a journey from flint to granite, from a hard bright light to opalescent mists, and it is broken at Glastonbury, not at all a vanished town but, for me, a staging for Camelot.

Camelot is among the most yearned-for lost cities in the world, and the modern quest for it has been surpassed in determination and intensity only by its citizens' legendary quest for the Sangreal, the cup used at the Last Supper and then by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood of Jesus at the Crucifixion. Was Camelot Colchester? ask the historians. Possibly. Could it have been Winchester? About a dozen years ago a Camelot Research Committee, a group of British archeologists, excavated the vast earthworks called Cadbury Castle in order to put King Arthur's lovely capital on the Ordnance Survey map, but although there were plenty of archeological finds, none spelled Camelot. None, I fear, ever will.

The best gathering place for those hoping to invade Arthur's kingdom is Glastonbury. The town was once an island on a watery plain and is visible for a great distance because of its famous Tor, a peculiar column-like hill of some 500 feet crowned with a tall church. This Tor dominates the surrounding landscape like a totem.

To spell out what Glastonbury has meant to pilgrims over the centuries would be impossible. Mystics say that it is magnetic; folklorists that it is central to the British version of a worldwide legend, and historians - well, having such a pile of rich tales to work through before they can get anywhere near history proper, they say what they can under the circumstances. Glastonbury is where everyone goes to theorize.

The countryside surrounding Glastonbury is none other than Avalon, the holy ''Isle of Apples'' to which not only King Arthur and his knights, but many of England and Ireland's saints made their way, their destination the spot below the Tor where the scanty remains of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Mary now stand, a place of quite enormous sanctity, for it was believed that not only Joseph of Arimathea had walked there, but Jesus himself. (''And did those feet . . . ?'' asked William Blake.) At the Abbey is the empty space in the grass that is one of Arthur's reputed graves. (The other site that tradition holds to be Arthur's final resting place is Slaughter Bridge, in Cornwall.) Here ''the once and future king'' waits until it is time to rule a better Britain, and it is here that the staff St. Joseph thrust in the soil took root and now blooms at Christmas. (A twig goes to the Queen to decorate her dinner table.) The visitor will see the gaping Abbey, the enigmatic Tor, the grave, the thorn, and will see with a different eye that a mythology of a heroic nature and size lies spread before him, and he could be daunted. For he will also recognize that there are no shortcuts to getting at the truth of what happened here. Indeed, a small army of Arthurians have spent their lives doing little else.

The historical Arthur was most likely a youthful resistance leader who, during a time of national confusion and despair, the pagan invasion from Northern Europe, rallied his compatriots with a call to extol and fight for the old virtues. Using knighthood as a concept of manly perfection and a round table so that no one could take precedence, he led his men as one among equals. After his death, his character and his exploits became the favorite subject of fireside storytellers, gradually evolving into a kind of nobly decorated truth. Soon Arthur became Britain's hero-king, who had to be given a place in written history and in the mainstream of European myth. He was human and he was magic, a devotee of Christ and one who himself would return to usher in an inspired rule.